Guest Editors’ Introductionhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255130
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‘Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croit’1
‘I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak’, writes Samuel Beckett in The Unnameable, ‘but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter’.2 Listening to the voice of folly can be like this: an endless flow of inconsistencies, of contradictions, sayings and unsayings; a tantalizing, mischievous mockery of speech–unable to go on, unable to end. And yet–as this volume shows–we are irresistibly drawn to folly, its promises, its whispers of ‘even more interesting’ things: of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallGuest Editors’ Introduction2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressGuest Editors’ IntroductionPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®406012016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04The Folly of Poetryhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255131
<p></p>
What is more foolish, the poet or poetry? Why should a poet be mad and a scientist rational and wise? There was a time, in ancient Greece, when the scientist and the poet were one and the same person: the scientist, e.g. Empedocles, naturally expressed himself in verse, and even accounting for Aristotle’s caution that if you put Herodotus into verse that still is not poetry, no one in early Greece would have thought of a natural philosopher as a madman (Empedocles, of course, jumped into the flaming mouth of Aetna, and thus showed some degree of foolishness). Democritus, who first theorized about atoms and doesn’t seem to have been particularly mad, maintained that a work of poetry is truly beautiful if
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallThe Folly of Poetry2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressThe Folly of PoetryPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®808362016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Stultitia loquitur: Fiction and Folly in Early Modern Literaturehttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255132
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In the first edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, after the Greek title of the work, Encomion Morias, the European public of 1511 could find a brief designation of the character in charge of the speech: ‘Stultitia loquitur’–‘Folly speaks’. Halfway between the theatrical indication of the entrance of Folly as a dramatis persona and the rhetorical game of the orator opening a declamatio, and playfully showing his public the mask that the writer only pretends to assume, this phrase presents the reader with a particular problem: that of the special ability of ironic discourse to create fiction. This is a problem that, from the Renaissance to the early modern period, in France as in England, Italy or Spain, is
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallStultitia loquitur: Fiction and Folly in Early Modern Literature2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressStultitia loquitur: Fiction and Folly in Early Modern LiteraturePoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®416402016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Monstrous Conceptions: Sex, Madness and Gender in Medieval Medical Textshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255133
<p></p>
The victim of a wound in any nervous tissue, especially a wound penetrating beneath the surface of the skull, should abstain from coitus and from any social contacts and conversations with lascivious women. For in these activities the nervous system is worked hard and highly stressed, and the emotions and humours are stimulated; the result of such stimulation is fever. Similarly, experience tells us that many patients with wounds almost healed have died very quickly and humiliatingly from merely talking, from subsequent stimulation, or from nothing more than imagination as a result of seeing their friends engaged in such activity.1
This fervent advice from the early-fourteenth-century surgeon Henri
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallMonstrous Conceptions: Sex, Madness and Gender in Medieval Medical Texts2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressMonstrous Conceptions: Sex, Madness and Gender in Medieval Medical TextsPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®550522016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Glossolalic Follyhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255134
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In the several domains to which it belongs, the phenomenon of glossolalia is recurrently associated with different forms of ‘folly’. The term ‘glossolalia’ originally belongs to religious vocabulary where it refers to a specific gift in languages, a ‘speaking in tongues’ which produces religious trances that have been associated with ‘lunacy’. Since the nineteenth century, the term has been used in psychiatry and in psychopathology to describe a linguistic pathology. More recently, the term has entered the field of rhetoric and poetics.1 Indeed a number of twentieth-century writers, from the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century up to now, have encountered the phenomenon of glossolalia and have used it
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallGlossolalic Folly2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressGlossolalic FollyPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®558052016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04The Furies of Orestes: Constructing Persecutory Agency in Narratives of Exilehttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255135
<p></p>
Given that paranoia has been regarded both as a clinical mental disorder, substantiated by an ever increasing number of textbook cases, and as a metaphoric maladie du siècle, the twentieth century’s political master-folly, it is hardly surprising that the studies on this disease are numerous and methodologically highly diverse. Over the past century, these scholarly approaches have gradually moved from Kraepelin’s essentialist and unproblematic definition of paranoia as a distinct form of psychosis, characterized by persecutory delusions and illusions of grandeur,1 across different hypotheses on its causation and classification, to the more recent idea that paranoia is not at all a firm diagnosis but a
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallThe Furies of Orestes: Constructing Persecutory Agency in Narratives of Exile2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressThe Furies of Orestes: Constructing Persecutory Agency in Narratives of ExilePoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®563412016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Literature and the Politics of Madness: On the Twentieth-Century Reception of Friedrich Hölderlin in France and Germanyhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255136
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In the final chapter of his Histoire de la folie, Michel Foucault turns to the relation between unreason (déraison) and the work of art, his contention being that this relation undergoes a fundamental transformation at the end of the eighteenth century: ‘Depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la vie de la déraison ne se manifeste plus que dans la fulguration d’œuvres comme celles de Hölderlin, de Nerval, de Nietzsche ou d’Artaud.’1 Not only, then, does Foucault here accord an absolute privilege to art since the age of Romanticism, but the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) becomes a decisive figure in the history of madness, since he inaugurates this new epoch (our own) in which the sovereign labour (travail
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallLiterature and the Politics of Madness: On the Twentieth-Century Reception of Friedrich Hölderlin in France and Germany2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressLiterature and the Politics of Madness: On the Twentieth-Century Reception of Friedrich Hölderlin in France and GermanyPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®687032016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Analyzing Surrealist Madness Through the Poetry of Salvador Dalíhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255137
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In an issue of La Révolution surréaliste (1928) which celebrates the ‘Fiftieth anniversary of hysteria’, André Breton and Louis Aragon offer an alternative to contemporary psychology’s diagnosis of hysteria. They declare that:
Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental condition, marked by the subversion, quite apart from any delirium-system, of the relations established between the subject and the moral world under whose authority he believes himself practically to be. [. . . ] Hysteria is by no means a pathological symptom and can in every way be considered a supreme form of expression.1
In spite of their voice of pseudo-medical authority, Breton and Aragon make only the broadest of
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallAnalyzing Surrealist Madness Through the Poetry of Salvador Dalí2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressAnalyzing Surrealist Madness Through the Poetry of Salvador DalíPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®690222016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Dreams, Nightmares, and Lunacy in En rade: Odilon Redon’s Pictorial Inspiration in the Writings of J.-K. Huysmanshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255138
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This essay illuminates selected aesthetic approaches that are symptomatic of the key role that Symbolist art played in the evolution of the poetic topoi of folly and madness in fin de siècle French culture, as nineteenth-century Romantic representations of exalted poetic frenzy gradually moved towards twentieth-century Modernist visions of nightmarish absurdity. Arguably, while the former may lead to meaningful prophetic insight, the latter often trigger an acknowledgement of life’s meaninglessness, in European literature and painting alike. In the process of transition, French Symbolism paved the way for such major twentieth-century figures as Joyce or Yeats, among many others.
Within this
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallDreams, Nightmares, and Lunacy in En rade: Odilon Redon’s Pictorial Inspiration in the Writings of J.-K. Huysmans2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressDreams, Nightmares, and Lunacy in En rade: Odilon Redon’s Pictorial Inspiration in the Writings of J.-K. HuysmansPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®660872016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Explanations on the Edge of Reason: Lichtenberg’s Difficulties Describing Hogarth’s View of Bedlamhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255139
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This article discusses the unusual difficulties Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had describing William Hogarth’s view of Bedlam. Lichtenberg’s popular commentaries on Hogarth’s copperplate engravings, which in German are called ‘Erklärung’ (explanation),1 were and still are well known for their sharp wit. Lichtenberg recorded his comments about the engravings of the English painter between 1794 and 1799, creating a new genre for the description of the fine arts. But Lichtenberg’s celebrated communicational skills failed him during his work on the eighth copperplate engraving of Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress.2 I will argue that the reason for Lichtenberg’s sudden inability to express himself with his usual
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallExplanations on the Edge of Reason: Lichtenberg’s Difficulties Describing Hogarth’s View of Bedlam2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressExplanations on the Edge of Reason: Lichtenberg’s Difficulties Describing Hogarth’s View of BedlamPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®534492016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Bibliomania and the Folly of Readinghttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255140
<p></p>
Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere.
(Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.)
Francesco Petrarca, De remediis utriusque fortunae, ‘De librorum copia’
Antiquity was a relaxed period in terms of reading. With only a few texts around, there was a small number of well-known authors, and one knew them well or even by heart. It was paradise compared to our modern world of millions of new releases each year and the burden of all the historic books, with never enough time to take notice, let alone to read them all. But as every reader of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading or other works on this topic will know, the complaint over too many books and too
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallBibliomania and the Folly of Reading2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressBibliomania and the Folly of ReadingPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®1061612016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04‘Where Ignorance is Bliss’: The Folly of Origins in Gray and Hardyhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255141
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In the years and months that led up to the ‘Folly’ conference in July 2007, I found that I developed a fairly compulsive habit of noting down every time the word turned up in something that I was reading. I think I must have been hoping for general enlightenment on the subject, but in reality it seemed I was simply building up a rather dull and predictable empirical confirmation of the hunch that it was in the eighteenth century that folly had its verbal heyday, just at the time when tangible, material follies were beginning to pop up on the ground in every odd corner of the well-acred English gentleman’s estate. I was reading a novel by Richardson, and follies there were in profusion, on every other page it
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmall‘Where Ignorance is Bliss’: The Folly of Origins in Gray and Hardy2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University Press‘Where Ignorance is Bliss’: The Folly of Origins in Gray and HardyPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®649932016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Red Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of ‘Madness’ in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dallowayhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255142
<p></p>
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Great Britain experienced a very peculiar form of ‘folly’ commonly referred to as the ‘Russian fever’ or ‘Russian craze’.1 Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Gogol and Vsevolod Garshin were very popular both with the reading public and with major British writers. Virginia Woolf, for example, states in her groundbreaking essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919/1925): ‘The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time [. . . ].’2 While most of her
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallRed Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of ‘Madness’ in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressRed Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of ‘Madness’ in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs DallowayPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®571432016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04‘It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland’: The Rhetoric of the Mad African Forest in Conrad, Céline and Greenehttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255143
<p></p>
This article examines the rhetoric of madness in post-Conradian portrayals of the sub-Saharan African forest. My specific interest lies in certain privileged moments of description in Graham Greene’s travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936), and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), in which the language of description ceases to represent thought as the sane contemplation of an object and instead invents ways to imitate the irrational mental processes of dreams, hallucination, or madness. These privileged instances of cultivated confusion draw especially on the effects of stupefying detail – or its opposite, the stupefying lack of detail – in their language and logic of description.
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmall‘It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland’: The Rhetoric of the Mad African Forest in Conrad, Céline and Greene2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University Press‘It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland’: The Rhetoric of the Mad African Forest in Conrad, Céline and GreenePoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®599072016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04The New Praise of Follyhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/255144
<p></p>
And who is not a Foole [. . . ]? Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy1
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate.
But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallThe New Praise of Folly2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressThe New Praise of FollyPoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®392912016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Narrative Causalities (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/255145
<p></p>
The term ‘narratology’ persists despite a ferocious expansion of narrative study beyond its structuralist origins and a perfectly suitable alternative in the widely used term ‘narrative theory’. It persists, I think, because the ‘post’ of poststructuralist narratology never acquired the revolutionary fervour of capital P ‘Poststructuralism’. David Herman’s coinage, ‘postclassical narratology’, acknowledges as much. And now, in Narrative Causalities, Emma Kafalenos has produced what might be called a ‘neo-classical narratology’, breathing new life into venerable terms of classical narratology: Vladimir Propp’s idea of a narrative ‘function’ (1928), Algirdas Greimas’s idea of an ‘actantial’ role (1966)
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallNarrative Causalities (review)2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressNarrative Causalities (review)PoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®118762016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/255146
<p></p>
As late as 1922, W. B. Yeats considered Marius the Epicurean ‘the only great prose in modern English’, but he also wondered whether ‘it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends’. He meant especially the English victims of dissipation and despair, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons. ‘It taught us to walk upon a rope tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm’ (W. B. Yeats: ‘The Tragic Generation’ [1922]: in Autobiographies, edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 235). But it was T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Arnold and Pater’ (1930)
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallThe Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (review)2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressThe Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (review)PoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®86972016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Surprised in Translation, and: Stylistic Approaches to Translation (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/255147
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Translation is a fashionable subject these days, and a steady stream of books on various aspects of translation in theory and practice bears witness to this trend. Many books are aimed at the burgeoning international student market and hence repeat much of what has been said over the thirty years since translation studies first emerged as a field of study and tried to proclaim itself as an independent subject. Some, sadly, are so jargon-ridden that anyone outside the narrow pool of translation studies would gain little from reading them; but Mary Ann Caws’s elegantly written Surprised in Translation thankfully steers clear of jargon and engages instead with real translators and with the nitty-gritty of
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallSurprised in Translation, and: Stylistic Approaches to Translation (review)2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressSurprised in Translation, and: Stylistic Approaches to Translation (review)PoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®104032016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/255148
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The suggestion that music and literature represent fruitful areas for interdisciplinary study is a feature of several recent publications. This book, an outgrowth of Open University conferences in 2001 and 2002, is divided into four sections – ‘Theoretical Issues’, ‘Generic Alliances’, ‘The Gendered Text’ and ‘Narrative Modes’ – but might be understood more simply as studies focusing upon literary works (exploring musical references or parallels with musical structure), those discussing musical works with literary resonances, and chapters devoted to more theoretical or philosophical arguments.
Chapters with a primarily literary focus include some fascinating comparative studies. Whilst Regula Hohl
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallPhrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music (review)2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressPhrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music (review)PoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®135772016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04Kontroversen in der Literaturtheorie/Literaturtheorie in der Kontroverse (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/255149
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In 1965/66 the French literary historian and Racine expert Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes engaged in a major controversy about the aims and limits of interpretation. The title of Picard’s acerbic polemical pamphlet, which set the debate going, said it all: ‘Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture.’ Arguing from a traditional literary historian’s perspective for the priority of an author’s original intention, Picard detected in Barthes’s 1963 study Sur Racine an excess of ‘self-centred shallowness’, ‘pretentiousness’, and ‘naivety’; his method – couched in a ‘pathological’ language – violated all rules of sound logic and rational deduction, and his arbitrary and hollow results bordered on nothing less than
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-10T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/319/image/coversmallKontroversen in der Literaturtheorie/Literaturtheorie in der Kontroverse (review)2008-12-04text/htmlen-USEdinburgh University PressKontroversen in der Literaturtheorie/Literaturtheorie in der Kontroverse (review)PoetryEuropean literatureHuman reproductionLiterature, ExperimentalHölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843Dalí, Salvador,Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1742-1799Books and readingGray, Thomas,Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,Garshin, V. M.Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,Literature, ModernPater, Walter, 1839-1894French poetryLiterature2008-12-042008TWOProject MUSE®148422016-12-10T00:00:00-05:002008-12-04